


You Make it Real

by Perpetual Motion (perpetfic)



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M, YAGKYAS, YAGKYAS 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 16:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetfic/pseuds/Perpetual%20Motion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt and Ray go home to mama after OIF.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Make it Real

**Author's Note:**

> For YAGKYAS and my feels.

Walt goes to visit his mother after OIF, and she greets him at the airport with a hug and tears in her eyes. When they walk in the front door of the house, it smells like pot roast and pie. She pours him a glass of sweet tea and makes him sit at the kitchen table while she scoops pot roast and potatoes and vegetables onto plates. Once they’re seated and they’ve said grace, Walt stares into his dinner and says, “I think I met someone, Mama.”

“Get yourself a war bride?” his mother asks, smiling at him with that nostalgia she carries for when the family was so much larger. Walt’s the first only child in four generations. “Your great-uncle, my Uncle Earl, he met your Great-Aunt Bertie in the first world war.”

Walt eats a potato and scratches the back of his neck. “It’s not like that. It’s…” Walt sighs and puts down his fork and looks at his mother and says, “It’s a boy, Mama. Well, a man. A man I work with.”

His mother puts down her own fork and gives him the same pointed look she did when she caught him joyriding to the grocery store at fifteen. “Walter Jeremiah Hasser, you think for a second I care about that?”

“No!” he says because, really, he doesn’t. But he’s just spent so much time in a place and a headspace where it _does_ matter. Where it matters a lot. “It’s…”

“It’s that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, isn’t it?” she says. She smiles sadly when Walt just nods. “Oh, honey, you’ve always been honest as sunshine. You must be torn to bits inside.”

Walt doesn’t dare explain it’s not just that he’s sort hopelessly in love based on almost nothing, but that there’s things he did in Iraq (that roadblock, that damned roadblock) that are haunting him as much as how he feels.

“What’s his name?” she asks. She nudges at his hand, and Walt picks up his fork and spears a baby carrot. It’s so soft it almost disintegrates. Just like he likes it.

“Ray,” he says. “His name’s Ray.”

“Does he know you like him?”

Walt thinks about the night before they left the cigarette factory to come home. How he’d gone into the upper levels while everyone was downstairs having one last celebration. How Ray had found him, stood next to him as they stared out at the city. How, before Ray turned to leave, he reached out with a shaking hand and traced the shape of Walt’s forearm like he wanted to remember it forever. Walt remembers touching the side of Ray’s neck, feeling Ray’s pulse flutter under his fingers. He remembers wanting to curl his hand around Ray’s neck, reel him in and press their mouths together. But they’d stepped away from each other instead.

“He knows,” Walt says. “But it’s complicated. I don’t know for certain he really feels the same for me. There wasn’t any real good time to talk about it, you know?”

“I can’t even imagine,” his mother replies, and that’s all either of them have to say. Walt doesn’t mind; it’s always been the two of them talking when needed and being quiet when there’s nothing to add. He eats the rest of his dinner and lets his mother shoo him into the living room while she cleans up. He flops into his favorite chair and pulls his phone out of his pocket. There’s no missed calls, but he’s got three text messages. They’re all from Ray.

_Lemme know when you’re home safe._

_Hasser, you should have landed by now._

_Hasser, if you’re dead on the side of the road, I’m going to piss on your corpse._

Walt texts him back:

_I’m home safe you crazy ass mother hen. You?_

It’s only a minute or so when Ray texts him back:

_Up to my ears in family shit. Send help._

Walt laughs and puts his phone back in his pocket as his mother comes into the living room. She studies his face as she hands him a slice of pie and smiles.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” she says.

“Me, too,” Walt agrees.

*

Ray’s mother does not meet him at the airport. Kansas City is almost two hours from Nevada, and she’s not going to waste her time waiting by baggage claim when she can be home getting things ready for Ray’s visit. Ray appreciates that, still so far in his head from the clusterfuck that was OIF that a couple more hours to steady himself feels like the best gift in the world. He stops in the airport Starbucks long enough to buy a coffee and check his e-mail. There’s a message from his mom with detailed instructions about where to find her car in long-term parking, and Ray gets a few looks when he heaves his duffel onto the table to dig around for his spare set of keys.

“Do you need help, son?”

Ray looks up, left arm up to his elbow in his own dirty socks, and just manages not to ask the guy who’s walked up what the hell he wants. He’s older bordering on elderly with a pin on his windbreaker that’s from the local VFW. “I’m good, Sir,” Ray says. “Just trying to find my keys.”

“You didn’t park to go to war, did you?” the man asks, but there’s humor in his eyes.

“Naw, my mom came up with my grams the other day and left the car for me.”

“Where you going to?” the man asks.

“Nevada.”

“Pretty area over there,” the man says. He pats Ray on the shoulder and squeezes hard, looking at Ray’s face like he wants to remember him. “You get home safe.”

Ray get choked up. He blinks and nods, and the man nods in return before turning and walking away. Ray stares at his duffel and his cup of coffee, and the Starbucks logo looks odd and out-of-place with his life.

His fingers brush against his keys, and he snaps out of it.

His mind rolls over into mission mode. Remove keys. Close duffel. Re-shoulder duffel. Grab coffee. Go to long-term parking. Locate car. Locate the damn car. Locate the goddamn car.

He calls his mother and says, “I am in long-term parking and can’t find the damned car.”

“Welcome back,” she replies, icy but amused. “Maybe say hello to your mother, you jackass.”

“Hi, Mom,” he says. “I’ve missed you. I would like to come home and sleep in an actual bed, but I can’t find your goddamn car.”

“Row 17, spot G,” she says. “It’s next to an SUV with flags attached to both back windows.”

“That is not a helpful instruction.”

“I think it was a Durango.”

Ray spots one a few spots down. “That does help.”

“Don’t drive like a maniac. You’re on civilian roads.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and they both go quiet for a moment.

“I’ve missed you, honey,” his mom finally says, voice choked.

“Missed you, too,” he gets out. “Be there in a couple of hours.”

“Maybe drive a little like a maniac,” she says, and Ray laughs and agrees before they hang up.

His mom drives a hatchback, dark blue with a bumper sticker that says I’M PROUD OF MY MARINE. Ray makes a face at it as he slings his duffel into the back seat and then climbs into the car. He feels boxed in after so many weeks in the Humvee, and he spends a few minutes trying to get the seat just right before realizing he’s doing it.

“Come on, asshole,” he mutters as he backs out of the space. He thinks about the bridge, about jumping out under fire to scream orders. It feels far away and unreal, like it did when it happened, and he flips on the radio to try and distract himself.

On the highway, it takes him ten minutes to realize he doesn’t have his lights on.

When he walks in the door, his mother is right there, hugging him tight. When she pulls away, she holds his face in her hands, same as she did when he graduated junior high, same as she did when he graduated high school, same as she did when he graduated boot camp and Basic recon training.

She’d slapped him across the face when he’d come home and announced he’d enlisted rather than go to Vanderbilt on a full-ride. And Ray had been expecting, just a little, to come home to that. And that’s mean and cruel, but the thought had been with him all down the highway. He begs silent forgiveness by letting her stare as long as she wants.

“Oh, baby, I missed you,” she says, and then she’s hugging him again. “And I know you’re a badass killing machine who doesn’t want to have emotions, but fuck you, I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Ray says. “But if you tell anyone, I will bury you in a shallow grave.”

“Son, there ain’t a man alive that can kick his mother’s ass. Don’t ever forget that.”

“I won’t,” he says, and she lets him go and runs a hand over the peach fuzz on his head and says, “How was the flight?”

“It was all right,” Ray says. He props his duffel next to the door and follows his mom further into the trailer. It’s a double-wide, three bedrooms and one-and-half baths. The kitchen and dining area and living room all run together. The laundry room is barely a closet tucked behind the kitchen. Two of the bedrooms connect from a hallway on the far end of the living room, and the third bedroom is directly behind Ray’s back, perpendicular to the front door. “Place looks good,” he says as he sits at the kitchen table.

“I got Joey Mathers to come over and help me clean the furniture,” his mother says. “Rented the carpet vac from Wal-Mart.”

“I can tell.” He can’t, really. He’s never been able to tell, but his mother has always prided herself on giving him a good, clean home, and he’s willing to fib to make her smile. “You do anything in my room?”

“Put down fresh sheets and restocked your porn mags,” she says, and she laughs at the face Ray makes.

“Mental scarring in less than ten minutes, not bad,” he says as she turns from the sink and dries her hands. “What’s for dinner?” he asks. “I’m fucking starving.”

“What? You think you get a home-cooked meal just because you came back from war?” his mother asks as she reaches into the fridge and pulls out two beers.

“I’m a man, now, mother. I deserve a good meal.”

She gives him a long, serious look as she puts the beer in front of him. “Was it awful?” she asks.

Ray opens his beer and works the tab back and forth a few times. “Yeah,” he says. “It sucked exactly as much as promised.”

“I saw some things on CNN. They didn’t have anyone there, but there were stories.”

“We had a reporter in the Humvee,” Ray says, and for a moment, he can’t remember Reporter’s name. “Evan,” he pulls from his memory. “He writes for Rolling Stone. Used to write for Hustler.”

That makes his mother laugh, which was exactly what he was going for. “I’m sure you were all quick friends,” she says. She holds out her beer can, and Ray clicks his against it. “You’re gonna want to shotgun that,” she tells him. “We’ve got to be at the Pizza Hut in an hour for a surprise party I’m not supposed to tell you about.”

“Oh, fuck me, are you kidding?”

His mom gives him a rueful, knowing smile. “Your Aunt Susan outplayed me and went straight to your Gram before she even asked me if I had plans with you.”

“Have they started selling beer at Pizza Hut?”

“Nope, but if you’re real nice, I’ll show you where I hid the whiskey when we get back.”

Ray chugs half his beer, slams the can on the table, and makes a face. “Can I at least get a shot for courage?”

“Boy, you just got your ass back from war. If you ain’t got it yet, whiskey’s just going to get you drunk.”

“Okay, fine, can I have a shot of whiskey to be drunk before we get there?”

“A beer and a shot are going to get you drunk? I raised you better than that.”

Ray grins and doesn’t point out that he’s fifteen pounds lighter than when he left and that you don’t get to go out for beers every night when you’re at war. “Fine. I’ll deal with Aunt Susan 99% sober.”

“There’s my brave boy,” his mother says. She stands and pauses to kiss him on the head. “I’ve got to get changed for dinner. You keep your fatigues on. They’ll love ‘em.”

“All right.” He stays at the table and finishes his beer. He thinks about his last night in Iraq, going up to the second floor of the cigarette factory and finding Walt. Reaching out to him without thinking, and Walt reaching back.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and flips it open. He’d sent Walt two messages on his layover, checking to see if Walt had landed and made it home safe. No response yet. He writes a third:

_Hasser, if you’re dead on the side of the road, I’m going to piss on your corpse._

Then, he stands up from the table and stretches as hard as he can to work the kinks out of his back. His mom walks down the hall from her bedroom, dressed in a glittery black top and jeans, and he grins. “Wow, you really went all out.”

“Don’t sass,” she says as she grabs her purse from the hook by the door. “I wasn’t supposed to give it away. So, pretend to give a damn when we get there. And act surprised.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Ray says as they walk out the front door, down the steps, and to the car. “You wanna drive?”

She looks at him again. He doesn’t know what she sees, but she takes the car keys from his hand and gives him a knowing look. “How fast did you drive here?”

“Totally did the speed limit, and you can’t prove otherwise,” he replies and gets into the passenger side of the car.

“Uh-huh,” she says, and they’re quiet as they drive to the Pizza Hut, the radio station crackling out shitty pop country that Ray doesn’t know the words to anymore. Ray looks out the window as his hometown slides by and feels like a dick for kind of wishing he was back in his piece of shit Victor with Walt singing Willie Nelson songs as he cleans his gun.

“Hey,” Ray says as his mom stops at a red light. “Think I met a guy.”

“What? During the invasion?” his mother asks.

“Yeah,” Ray says.

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “You get this dramatic streak from your Aunt Susan.”

“I’ll tell her that,” Ray says. “Right after I explain that I like dick.”

“You do that,” she challenges. “I would love to watch her face go all red.”

They share a conspiratorial smile, and the light turns green. Ray gathers as much peace in the silence as he can before they pull into the parking lot of the Pizza Hut. His mom squeezes his arm--another bit of solidarity--and then they get out of the car, go inside, and Ray fakes surprise at his Gram, his Aunt Susan, his three cousins, and a few of his mom’s friends from work all yell, “Surprise!”

“Well, shit!” Ray yells, and the people in the booths around their table all look appropriately accepting of swearing in front of their kids because he is clearly a hard-working soldier just back from war. I am a goddamn Recon Marine, Ray wants to yell. And even if my moms hadn’t tipped me off, you motherfuckers are way too obvious to miss.

“There you are!” his Aunt Susan squeals, hugging him tight. “Couldn’t you have changed into something nicer?”

“Susan!” his mother hisses. “Really?”

“Don’t you two start,” his gram says. “Even though Susan should know better.” Susan glares at Gram but says nothing. Gram Person is Ray’s dad’s mother, and she decided she’d rather have a daughter-by-choice and grandson-by-blood rather than her own deadbeat kid back when Ray’s dad skipped town. Aunt Susan is Ray’s mom’s sister, and she has no power when Gram Person admonishes her. It is the only thing, Ray thinks, that keeps any of them from murdering the others.

“Let me see you, baby,” Gram says, and Ray falls into parade rest and waits for her slow once-over to finish. She’s a stout, short woman, just coming up to his shoulder, with a straight back and sharp brown eyes. Her hair is pure white, curled twice a week at the beauty salon, and she’s dressed in a blue pantsuit that is clearly new.

“Looking sharp, Gram,” Ray says.

“Thank you,” she replies, and then she hugs him tight. “You look very handsome.”

“Thank you,” Ray says.

“Come on and sit down,” Gram says and leads him to the spot at the head of the table. It takes a few minutes to get there. His cousins want to hug him. The women from his mom’s work who have all known him since he was in diapers want to hug him and pat his cheeks and be teary-eyed. When he finally sits down, the pizzas are delivered to the table by three terrified looking kitchen workers.

“Your Aunt Susan thought it would be best to order ahead of time,” his mother explains in an undertone as she takes the chair to his left. “Because, apparently, ordering whatever pizza you’d like at a Pizza Hut would be too much work for the staff.”

“We got down to one MRE a day for awhile,” Ray replies as his aunt starts goading one of the cousins to say grace. “Long as there’s no peanut butter on any of them, I can make it work.”

Aunt Susan ends up leading grace, and Ray ducks his head just so no one sees the look he and his mother share. They’re neither of them religious, and Ray could have done without the prayer entirely, but there are some things you just get through in the sake of family peace.

“So, Ray,” his Aunt Susan says. “Tell us what it was like.” She says it like he’s been off on some great adventure, like what he’s been through--and she’s got CNN, so he knows she knows at least some of it--is something light and fun to recount.

“It was hot, mostly,” Ray says. “And dry. Very desert-like.” His cousins all chuckle. His Gram shakes her head.

“Never did care for dry heat myself,” she says. “Did you at least have air conditioning?”

“Of course not, Gram. I’m a Recon Marine. We don’t go in for sissy things like air conditioning. It’d make us weak.”

Everyone laughs at that. Ray feels claustrophobic and reaches for a slice of pizza, taking a huge bite before his aunt can ask another stupid question.

“We’re all just so glad you’re home,” his mom says as his aunt Susan opens her mouth again. “And we can’t wait to catch you up. Susan’s had the boys landscaping her yard, and Tabby, Kelly, Becky, and I have started a book club.”

Ray gives a fake, suspicious look to the ladies lined up down the table next to his mom. “Wait a minute,” he says. “That can’t be right. Why would a bunch of librarians want to read books?”

Everyone laughs again, and then Aunt Susan starts telling him about the landscaping (for which he could literally not care any less), and his cousins chime in complaining about how much its sucked, what with it getting so warm lately (high of 82 last week, one of them says, and Ray nearly scoffs), and then Kelly and Tabby and Becky all start talking about the book club, and his mother chimes in as they start talking about the books they’re reading in the book club, and his Gram pats his hand and smiles and tells hims about the church bazaar she’s helping organize, and Ray excuses himself and goes to the bathroom and checks his phone.

Walt’s finally texted him back:

_I’m home safe you crazy ass mother hen. You?_

Ray stares at the message for a minute and thinks about the cigarette factory again, the way he was certain Walt was going to reel him in and kiss him and the fact that Walt didn’t reall him in didn’t feel like a refusal-refusal, just good sense. He wants to text back and tell him that. He wants to call and tell him that. But he doesn’t:

_Up to my ears in family shit. Send help._

He closes his phone, jams it in his pocket, and goes back out to deal with the crowd. There are people coming up to the table now wanting to shake his hand and thank him for his service, and some of them he knows, but some of them he doesn’t, and it feels like it’s days later when his mom says, “I am plumb wore out, kiddo. Can I drag you away?” And Ray begs for five more minutes he doesn’t want to use and leaves after three.

“God. Thank you,” he says in the car.

“You’re welcome,” his mother replies.

When they get home, she unearths the whiskey from behind the cleaning supplies and pours them each a double shot over ice. They sit across from each other and sip their drinks. Halfway through his, Ray feels every muscle in his back relax, and he says, “His name’s Walt. He was our gunner.”

“I thought Garza was your gunner.”

“He was at first, but then we got a Humvee with a .50 cal, so Brad traded him out for Walt.”

“What’s he like?”

Ray swirls his whiskey and tries to come up with adjectives for Walt. “Really focused. Worried a lot. He…” Ray thinks about Walt taking the shot at the roadblock, at the way his whole face seemed to disappear behind a mask of horror that never quite went away. “He’s got a lot of heart. Smart, too.”

“Good. No dumb, pretty boys for my son.”

Ray grins. “He is disgustingly pretty. Like, it would blow your mind how pretty.”

“What would Gram Person think?” his mom asks, and they chuckle at the old joke.

When Ray had come out to his mom (“Mom, I think I might be into dudes. Like, into dudes. Like, sex and stuff.”), she’d assured him it was fine, that she loved him, and then Ray had asked, deeply concerned what Gram Person would think, and his mother had called her immediately.

“Ray likes boys,” she’d said. “Maybe as much as he likes girls; maybe more. He’s not sure.”

“Well, unless it stops him from helping me put up Christmas decorations, I could give a flip,” she’d replied.

“She could give a flip,” Ray tells his mom now, and she reaches out and squeezes his hand.


End file.
